Taking one more swing at the idiot nudgelords who associate the Soviet Union with environmental protection

Chernobyl, baby

Hey, wait a second? The authors of Nudge . . . they’re not idiots! One of them won the Nobel Prize, and people keep telling me that the other guy is really smart. You don’t get to be Henry Kissinger’s pal by being a dummy, right?

And yet . . . they keep saying some really dumb things.

Whassup with that?

My guess is that they have no editor. Even the best of us make mistakes, even the best of us write some stupid things from time to time. If we’re lucky, though, we can show our writings to some trusted person who can point out where we’re wrong. Or to some complete strangers—like our blog commenters!—who feel free to point out where we’re wrong, or where they think we’re wrong.

I absolutely looove when youall disagree with me. It’s a no-lose situation: either you find a legitimate error and then I can fix it and recalibrate my thinking as needed, or you’re wrong in your correction, but in that case it’s still a useful sign that I’ve failed to communicate clearly.

I’m speaking here of sincere criticism, not trolls or Russian agents or people who are otherwise trying to muddy the waters. But the vast majority of you do seem to be sincere, and even the trolls often have good points, and the agents and equivalents usually go away once it’s clear that we’re not going to give them twitter-style engagement.

Anyway, back to the Nudgelords . . . I think their problem is they’re too successful, so they don’t need to listen to critics. Also, not listening to critics is a contributing factor to their success! One thing that made them Lords rather than just Commoners is their unshakeable confidence.

I thought about this because I happened to come across this 2013 review by Samuel Freeman of Cass Sunstein’s book, “Simpler: The Future of Government.” Here’s Freeman:

Simpler is a follow-up to Nudge. Sunstein draws from his experiences as head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) from 2009 to 2012. . . .

Sunstein contends that “the future of government” largely lies in policies that preserve freedom of choice. Such policies, which he and Thaler dubbed “nudges,” would encourage people to make decisions that benefit rather than harm them. . . .

“To count as a mere nudge,” Sunstein writes, “the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting the fruit at eye level [in a school cafeteria, for example] counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.”

Uh oh . . . he’s citing the work of the discredited business-school professor Brian Wansink! As we’ve discussed before, the problem is not that Sunstein got conned by that now-disgraced food researcher, but rather that, after the problems with Wansink’s work came out, they removed all references to it from the second edition of Nudge—without reflection on how they’d been fooled. That’s where the idiocy happened.

But now let me show you the place where Sunstein really brings on the stupid. Here’s Freeman again:

Finally, rather than “Soviet-style” national restrictions on major sources of pollution, they advocate incentive-based approaches that increase freedom of choice, ideally, for example, a cap-and-trade system in which “rights” to pollute could be purchased or given away and then traded on the market.

What an idiot, to refer to environmental protection laws as “Soviet-style”! Hasn’t he heard about the environmental devastation in the Soviet Union? Soviet-style is to let factories pollute because they’re run by well-connected people, and there were no independent executive, legislative, and judicial branches to make and enforce the rules. To think of pollution restrictions as “Soviet” . . . that’s just nuts, it’s both illogical and ahistorical.

It’s really frustrating that this sort of thing is taken seriously.

P.S. You might thing, Sure, but that was 2013, and since then we’ve had the replication crisis, the winds have changed, and nobody takes that crap seriously anymore. But nooooo, here it is in 2023: bullshit nudge numbers in the New York Times in 2023. I’m not blaming Sunstein for that one; my point only is that there are a lot of people who want to believe this stuff.

P.P.S. To be fair, Sunstein can be a thoughtful writer sometimes, for example in this review of a biography of the economist Albert Hirschman. I suspect that Sunstein’s thinking is clearest when it is detached from his personal ambitions, so that instead of trying to stake out some position, he can just step back and tell it like it is. I’d like to think he could do more of that going forward.